J E Thomas - Voices from Captivity: Incarceration from Siberia to Guantánamo Bay

Voices from Captivity: Incarceration from Siberia to Guantánamo Bay — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Voices from Captivity: Incarceration from Siberia to Guantánamo Bay" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...98

VOICES FROM
CAPTIVITY

Incarceration from Siberia
to Guantnamo Bay

J E THOMAS

Jessica Kingsley Publishers
London and Philadelphia

Contents

Introduction

This is a book about the experience of being locked up. I draw upon the reflections of hundreds of captives. These include rich and poor, people of all colours, men and women, old and young. They range from people who have stolen money to those who have tried to overthrow the state, or who have been accused of doing so. There are those who are guilty of heinous crimes and those who have committed no offence at all, or have engaged in behaviour which no civilised mature society would define as criminal. Some have had a chance to hear the evidence against them, and an opportunity to refute it, many have not.

I make no judgement on the reasons why people find themselves in captivity, or on the accuracy of what they say. The fact is that this is what they believe they experienced, and no one is in any position to say that they are mistaken.

Most of the evidence I have set out is first hand from the experience of captives. Occasionally it is second hand from those who have been in contact with captives. Sometimes I quote from purely academic or theoretical writing. I also sometimes draw on similarities between prisons and what Erving Goffman (1961) calls total institutions. These include monastic establishments and the military. But the central fact about captivity remains: a person is locked up and has to cope with this horror. This horror is to be found across all cultures and traditions, and is timeless and universal.

I trace the career of the captive from the moment of being first locked up. I examine the shock of having to adjust to the loss of freedom, and having to live in a society of people thrown together at random. Next, I explore the strange relationship of the captor and captive, and then the ways of compensating for the key deprivation of sexual relations. The various forms of punishment and cruelties inflicted on captives, over and above the fact of imprisonment itself, are set out and then I deal with the especial plight of the political prisoner. Finally, I draw upon the problems captives face when the ostensibly happy day of release arrives. Although I have divided their experience into chapters, there is much overlapping: for example, sexual attacks on women are both a matter of sexual deprivation and the imposition of torture.

Many captives have written about their grief, their woe and their determination to overcome their quite extraordinary experience. It is impossible to do justice to all of their suffering or to their recovery from that suffering, and so, because of the sheer volume of reflection, I have had to be selective about the lives I have quoted. Nothing can adequately embrace the total misery of life in captivity which has been shared by millions.

On Being Locked Up

The overwhelming impression made upon new captives is that they are entombed. And yet they are alive, frightened, miserable and confused. Apart from the dire events which have led to their incarceration, there is the prospect, for the majority, of being propelled into a world which is beyond their imagining, but which they may be certain has no redeeming features.

Rupert Croft-Cooke was convicted of homosexual behaviour in 1953, at that time defined as a criminal offence, and sentenced to six months imprisonment, which he served in Wormwood Scrubs and Brixton prisons in London. Always denying his guilt, he wrote a moving account of how a prisoner feels when they wake up on their first morning of captivity:

Whatever his crime or failure or bungling or bad luck may have been, he is consciously or unconsciously in a state of raw sensitivity. At Wormwood Scrubs, a prison for first offenders, he is probably spending the first hours of his life in captivity, separated from those he loves, and fearful of the future. Yesterday was the most cruel and critical day of his life. He stood in the dock and was sentenced, locked in a cell below the courts with others similarly treated, handcuffed, put through the long and painful business of Reception, and finally left in a cell. He has risen this morning without having slept and has been brought before the man responsible for his immediate future.

This statement sums up the universal experience of the newly arrived captive, even if this is not the first time they are being locked up. And more shocks are to follow.

One of these, and surely the most feared, is the expectation that they are likely to be physically hurt. Another English prisoner, Erwin James, serving a life sentence for murder, has a lesson in the endemic violence present in all kinds of captive institutions even before he has spent a night in prison:

A stream of denim-clad men in identical blue-and-white-striped shirts are shuffling past my door. I step out and join the flux. Down two flights of metal stairs to the ground floor, we head towards a set of trestle tables.

A row of prisoners in white are serving food. Before I get there I am stopped in my tracks by a scream.

Hes fuckin dead meat!

Nonce ! Hes fuckin dead meat!

I turn and see two men: one wields a mop handle, the other a metal bucket. They are using the metal instruments to beat a third prisoner, who cowers in a cell doorway.

Hes fuckin dead meat!

Suddenly I am aware that no one else is stopping. Nobody is intervening. Few even look in the direction of the violence. I fall back in line, pick up a tray and return to my cell. As I sit on the chair and spoon down the food, all thought and feelings about why I am in prison are relegated. My first priority, I now understand, is to learn to survive.

Very soon after arrival, the deadening process of reception the euphemism used to describe the next stage is set in motion. Watching the reaction of new arrivals tends to make any observer wonder if there cannot be an alternative to imprisonment.

The womens prison at Holloway, London, is one of the best known prisons in the world. And it was there that Jenny Hicks started a five-year sentence for fraud. Despite her considerable experience of being locked up, this time even she was surprised at what she met:

The reception at Holloway was quite horrific. There were women there who had been in police cells for days and had not had a proper wash. There were women at various stages of shock or trauma some withdrawing from drugs or drink and all of us had our clothes taken from us and were wrapped in those horrible towelling dressing-gowns. I was put in this small box like a horse box and I sat there eating the piece of white bread and butter and cold sausage which had been given to me.

Another prisoner, Amanda, also had experience of Holloway. When she arrived in 1997, what struck her, as it has for generations of captives, was the grime:

I just couldnt believe it when I opened the door that I was going to be put in a room like this, with graffiti all over the wall. The room was filthy, the mattresses were filthy. Two of us got moved together, and we literally scrubbed our room from top to bottom. I scrubbed my loo, and it was sparkling in the end.

In many other countries the atmosphere was at least as bad, and often worse. The Nigerian writer and political activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was shocked to learn about conditions in the cells of the Central Police Station in Port Harcourt. These were a good deal worse than Holloway:

Next page

1234567...98

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Voices from Captivity: Incarceration from Siberia to Guantánamo Bay»

Look at similar books to Voices from Captivity: Incarceration from Siberia to Guantánamo Bay. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Norman Manea

Captives

Catherine M. Cameron

Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World

Bill Keller

Whats Prison For?: Punishment and Rehabilitation in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Hank Dixon

A Lifers Journey: Prison Chaplaincy from the Inside Out

Ruth Elwood Martin (editor)

Arresting Hope: Women Taking Action in Prison Inside Out

Ellen Kane

Prison Nurse - Mayhem Murder and Medicine

Sarah Mirk

Guantanamo Voices: An Anthology: True Accounts from the Worlds Most Infamous Prison

Holly Lorincz.

A Day in Prison: An Insiders Guide to Life Behind Bars

Camp Delta.

Obamas Guantánamo: stories from an enduring prison

Fassin Didier

Prison worlds: an ethnography of the carceral condition

Schenwar

Locked down, locked out : why prison doesnt work and how we can do better

Sarah Tyson

Philosophy Imprisoned: The Love of Wisdom in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Discussion, reviews of the book Voices from Captivity: Incarceration from Siberia to Guantánamo Bay and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.